Word: martine
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...skeleton of a Japanese soldier. After watching a sailor pinch a bar girl on the bottom, he tries out that sign of affection on his family's elderly Chinese maid, with disastrous results. When his father gets into a minor road accident, an angry mob gathers?until Martin, then 9, stuns everyone into silence with a burst of newly acquired Cantonese obscenities...
...mixing a mean cocktail." The heroine is his mother?spunky, intelligent and curious about all things Chinese. Dad, a civilian employee of the navy, wants to go home; Mum wants to stay. As the family heads for the ship that will return them to England, she impulsively grabs Martin and leaps from the car. Gweilo is artfully shy of detail about what comes next, and sadly there will be no sequel. So this sunny, luminous memoir?along with the three forthcoming children's books the dying Booth also completed?will have to serve as his epitaph, ensuring that he will...
...Martin Booth's first day in Hong Kong in 1952, his parents took him to lunch at the British naval base where his father was about to start work. There the seven-year-old was confronted with a frightening plateful of leggy crustaceans unknown back in England. As he recounts in Gweilo, a memoir of his first three years in the former crown colony, a naval officer briefed him on local customs: "Whenever someone offers you something to eat, accept...
...ghosts that possess Mitchell--James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Martin Amis--are sturdy ones, and this master of voices knows science and generic utopian Asia, Steven Spielberg and British misanthropy. His language crackles with texture and bite: "Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman" and "[the] sequined gaggle of mantled goslings streamed past me." Mitchell, with typical impenitence, even invents a whole new dialect ("A yarnin' is more delish with broke-de-mouth grinds") for a race in the future. The propulsive zing of his sentences and the unexpected U-turn of his narrative give added fuel...
...doesn't alter his course in response to poll results means two things: he's sure he's right (which is scary enough), and he doesn't care about the opinions of those he serves. These attitudes add up to a god complex, and that's dangerous. Lauren Martin Freeland...